Exposed: BitTorrent Pirates at the DOJ, Parliaments, Record Labels and More

After revealing that employees at Hollywood movie studios are pirating movies themselves, we now move on to some other high profile organizations. As it turns out, the Big Three record labels are also using BitTorrent to pirate movies and software. And they're not alone, we also found plenty of pirates at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the U.S. House of Representatives and at various European Parliaments.

Most TorrentFreak readers know that when you use BitTorrent without a VPN, the whole world is able to see what you’re downloading and where from.

Dozens of companies collect this incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates, and some even go as far sharing this information in public. This allows us to reveal that unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places.

Yesterday we documented that employees at several of the largest Hollywood movie studios are avid BitTorrent users. Today we’ll highlight a few other organizations, starting with three of the biggest record labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

Universal Music Group

At Universal Music Group employees have been caught downloading several movies and TV-shows including The Cleveland Show, Transformers and Finding BigFoot. Below are three of the torrents that were shared from static IP-addresses registered to the record label, but there are many more.

Sony Music Entertainment

At Sony Music Entertainment’s New York office we found plenty of BitTorrent pirates as well. The XBox 360 game “Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions” and a recent episode of Gossip Girl are among the downloaded titles the record label is linked to.

Warner Music Group

IP-addresses registered to Warner Music Group are sharing on BitTorrent as well. An episode of Suits for example, and the movies House at the End of the Street and Finding Nemo.

And there’s more.

The U.S. Department of Justice, who are accusing Kim Dotcom of sharing a 50 Cent track, harbors several BitTorrent pirates in their offices too.

The same can be said for the Department of Homeland Security, where not all employees appear to be law abiding citizens.

Sometimes the content that’s being downloaded is rather topical for the organization or institution. For example, here’s what an employee of the “Army Air Force Exchange Services” has downloaded.

And then there are the lawmakers at the U.S. House of Representatives where we see that, among other things, the TV-shows Game of Thrones and Person of Interest are being downloaded.

BitTorrent is also used in the highest political offices in Europe of course.

Perhaps what we can learn from this exercise is that there are BitTorrent pirates in all decent sized companies and institutions. We can repeat the above for every outfit that has IP-addresses registered in their name, and a search for Facebook, Netflix (!) or Microsoft will bring back plenty of results.

Feel free to look for more yourself and post your findings in the comments.